Serif MoviePlus X6 review

best buy

1 / 3

Serif is to software development what Madonna is to pop music: relentlessly ambitious, not shy about taking inspiration from others, a little patchy at times but, every now and again, capable of producing a gem. MoviePlus X6 is one of those occasions when everything has come together.

Blend modes and the ability to group tracks together open up all sorts of creative approaches to layering clips

The software includes numerous features that are normally reserved for software costing 10 times as much. It supports unlimited tracks. Video tracks can be grouped together, with one acting as a mask for another – just the thing for making video appear inside text. It supports blend modes for combining the colours in clips in complex ways – a common feature for image editors but rare among video editors.

It also offers features that, for us, are crucial for an efficient editing experience. These include comprehensive control over ripple editing, whereby clips move along the timeline to close gaps or make space when earlier clips are edited. Overlapping two clips on the timeline automatically creates a dissolve transition between them. Dragging the edge of a clip while holding down the Ctrl key changes its playback speed to fit its new length.

The ability to preview the timeline without dropping frames is the single most important ingredient for a successful editing experience, and MoviePlus pulls out all the stops to make this happen. It fared well in our standard preview performance test, playing back five simultaneous AVCHD streams on our Core i7 870 PC. Its resource management prioritises user input, so the controls never became sluggish even for highly complex timelines.

A Pre-render function caches complex sections of the timeline as a temporary file to enable smooth playback. Vegas and Premiere Elements have similar features, but MoviePlus’s is easier to manage and, unlike Vegas, doesn’t require pointless re-rendering when the sections are moved. MoviePlus also includes a proxy editing mode, whereby HD clips are swapped for lower quality copies to take the strain off the PC while editing, reverting to the originals for export. It’s a crucial feature for editing HD video on slower PCs, and one that’s notably absent from Sony and Adobe’s editors.

The 3D transform controls can help titles interact with the perspective in the underlying video

None of these features are new to version X6, and in previous reviews our enthusiasm was tempered by some notable gaps in MoviePlus’s feature list. Blu-ray authoring is now included, though, and there’s also an option to burn AVCHD discs. These contain Blu-ray-quality video but use cheap DVD media and writers, and play in most set-top Blu-ray players.

Another complaint we had with previous versions was the uninspiring effects, but Serif has made some advances here. The improved colour correction takes its inspiration from Adobe Lightroom, with controls for brightening shadows, darkening highlights and a Clarity control that falls somewhere between contrast and sharpening to give extremely punchy tones.

The new 3D Transform effect moves, rotates and animates video clips on three axes, with handles overlaid onto the preview for intuitive control. It’s available in addition to the existing 2D Transform controls, and video titles have an additional set of 2D Transform controls. This can get pretty confusing, but with careful use it’s possible to create polished animations. It would be even more powerful with individual keyframe lanes for each parameter, though – MoviePlus only offers keyframe lanes per effect, so attempting to animate certain combinations of parameters independently, such as scale and rotation, can cause problems. Meanwhile, there are still no distortion effects such as deform or wave – the effects library remains a little uninspiring.

QuickMovie is instant-results editing, but the results are predictably clumsy

Other new features include a batch converter function, direct uploads to Facebook and export templates for iPhone, iPad and various other devices. Also new is QuickMovie Studio, which edits video clips together based on themed templates. It’s a common feature among consumer video editors, but while most chop clips up into garbled nonsense, QuickMovie goes to the opposite extreme and uses the selected clips in their entirety, giving finished videos an extremely slow pace.

There’s further room for improvement among the effects, and we’re still waiting for a vertical zoom control to show more tracks on the timeline – the individual track minimise buttons are no substitute. However, MoviePlus X6 handles core editing tasks with aplomb, and it excels in its ability to handle demanding formats and complex edits on relatively modest hardware. Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum narrowly holds on to the top spot for those with fast PCs, but for editing HD on laptops and slower desktop PCs, MoviePlus is our top recommendation.